Words, words, words ...

Words just excite me. In text or in speech the way that words shape thoughts and actions have always been a joy. Calligrams, words which explain themselves by their shape, size, colour and juxtaposition have certainly inspired many poets and the idea of creating shapes and patterns with words really does appeal.

I have just come across a Web 2.0 app that takes this to a creative place that I feel is stimulating and different. It is Wordle.

This is what they say about themselves:

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

Text2mindmap

Chris Smith has just Twhirled about a new tool for building mindmaps. It is called 'Text2mindmap' and it looks as if it good be a really nice addition to a communication 'set'.

It is a Text-to-Mind Map converter on the web. It converts your text or list of keywords to a mind map instantly.You give it a list of words and it will draw a mind map, which you can download to your computer for future use.

For the technically minded:

Text2mindmap uses an Adobe Flex 2.0 component that displays a set of items that are linked to each other. The component calculates the layout for the items using an organic-looking annealing algorithm based on the size and links of each item, and draws lines to represent the links. The component allows the user to drag and/or interact with individual items.

I have been using Visual Thesaurus and Visuwords for a while now but the ability that Text2Mindmap has to allow me to produce my own word lists for association will add to my tool set.